Reporting and Sharing features to look for when evaluating Business Intelligence

Looking into your Business Intelligence options? When it comes to understanding the health of your business, as well as key operational insights, BI is certainly an important tool to have. But when evaluating options, keep in mind, it's also important that you're able to easily and securely build reports and share those insights with the rest of your teams. Yet many solutions fail to provide this functionality — which is why it's a good idea to choose a BI solution that enables easy report-building and sharing.

To take it a step further, comprehensive BI solutions should also include functionality enabling users to pull BI data directly into widely-used programs like Microsoft® Excel, PowerPoint or Word, in manageable pieces — allowing users to quickly create stylized, up-to-date reports using pre-built drag & drop functionality. This will help improve the ease of BI report-building, as it connects specific BI data (like weekly sales figures) directly to report-building programs without the need for any query-writing or manual work. You and your teams can get a lot out of a BI solution when you're able to customize the report however you'd like to — leveraging tools you're already familiar with, such as formulas, sorting and filtering, or even advanced HTML customization.

Of course, sharing reports with appropriate team members using on-demand or scheduled distribution is another key feature to look for in a solution. Best-in-class BI software will enable you to send reports via automated emails, add them to a network folder, or place them in a web-based newsstand, with user-based authorization so that team members always have access to the reports they're authorized to access.

Your BI solution will give your company great insight into your business, which is key in today's competitive market. But to get the most out of your BI solution, it's important to make sure that the reporting functionality is easy to work with.